Nicor Says Mercury Spilled At More Sites

Contamination Found At 6 New Locations, Company Tells State

Nicor Gas told state authorities it discovered spilled mercury at four industrial sites in two Chicago suburbs, but the source of the toxic metal was a different device than the regulators that contaminated junkyards and homes around northern Illinois.

Late Tuesday night, company officials acting under state and federal laws that require immediate notification of any hazardous waste spill reported the contamination to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, said Julia Gentile, an attorney for the agency.

Officials in Chicago Heights and Cicero, where the spills occurred, said neither state officials nor Nicor told them about the findings.

For Nicor, which is facing a lawsuit over its contamination of homes from mercury-filled gas regulators and meters that were replaced at 200,000 homes, Tuesday's admission to authorities again expands the scope of the problems and shows the utility's mishandling of the toxic metal is more widespread.

Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan has publicly complained the company has continually supplied inaccurate or incomplete information to law enforcement authorities investigating the residential contamination and the illegal disposal of gas regulators.

"If they find mercury, it is another expansion of the problem," said Ryan's spokesman, Dan Curry.

Craig Whyte, a spokesman for Nicor, said the company has begun an inspection of more than 250 commercial and industrial buildings where a device called a manometer is used to measure gas pressure at meters on large gas lines.

Whyte said Nicor, working with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in inspecting the sites, has begun cleanup efforts. He said the company identified six sites, not four, where there was mercury contamination from the devices.

"We have been working closely with the Illinois EPA and kept them informed every step of the way," he said.

Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in interviews Wednesday were predicting the issue of mercury contamination from devices used in industry would become more of a widespread problem in the country. Brad Stimple, a coordinator for the agency who is investigating Nicor spills, said mercury was used in "untold devices" to regulate and measure gas pressure. "There is a ton of (mercury) out there," he said.

Since at least 1993, the gas industry has known the manometers were a potential source of environmental problems. In a 1993 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Gas Research Institute in Chicago, it warned that manometers, which are frequently used at wellheads to measure gas pressure and at metering sites, "are a potential serious problem because of the toxicity of mercury."

Nicolas Bloom, a scientist for Frontier Geosciences Inc. in Seattle, said that historically, the natural gas industry has had a huge mercury problem as it relates to gas meters and manometers.

"In the old days, they'd just dump the mercury from the manometers," Bloom said.

"Every couple of years, you had to clean out the manometers and put new, fresh clean mercury in them. It was cheaper to dump out the mercury than to try and recover it."

Bloom estimated there may be as many as 100,000 sites throughout the United States that have been contaminated with mercury from the natural gas industry.

Bloom was asked to participate on a team that would make recommendations about how a Texas utility would go about cleaning up mercury spills caused by dumping pipeline manometers at several of their industrial sites.

He said the utility didn't want to spend more than $200 per site for cleanup. He put the estimate at $200,000 per site.

"They quickly stopped talking to us when they found out it was going to be way more expensive than they wanted to hear about," said Bloom.

David Donahue, a spokesman for the town of Cicero, said after inquiries by the Tribune, town officials called officials of the Illinois EPA and Nicor.

He said Nicor said it recently discovered a broken manometer in an abandoned building that was once a steel manufacturing plant and that small quantities of mercury had spilled.

In Chicago Heights, there were three sites being investigated. A company official, who asked not to be named, said inspectors from Nicor and the U.S. EPA were at his steel manufacturing plant most of the day.

He said the spill was confined to a small cement block building where company gas meters are located along with manometers.

In addition, Nicor reported a spill at the Ford Motor Co.'s Chicago Heights plant. Company officials couldn't be reached for comment.

Adam Bottner, head of the environmental division for the Cook County state's attorney's office, said his office is looking into the spills and that the lawsuit the office and Ryan's office filed this month gives them the tools they need to find out what happened.